Sun.com domain to be decommissioned

Oracle has announced that the www.sun.com web site will be decommissioned on 1 June. Oracle acquired the domain when it bought Sun Microsystems; it rebranded much of the content on the web site with the Oracle logo while moving other content to it's own web sites. The company believes that it is sufficient to have migrated the content of sites such as BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com and some sections of Sun Developer Network to appropriate Oracle sites.

This migration isn't complete though; for example, still to be relocated is the Solaris Hardware Compatibility List. When the decommissioning happens, it appears that there will be no redirects for older links to direct users' web browsers to the new home of that content. Simon Phipps, formerly Sun's Open Source Officer, warned that it "looks like we have even more link corrosion coming up", if the shutdown goes ahead as currently planned. The sun.com site is the twelfth oldest .com domain on the internet and numerous sites link directly to pages within the site. Sun also embedded the domain name in the Java language with private packages with the com.sun prefix and tag libraries with URI's that pointed to java.sun.com.

Some users are already creating unofficial archives of content such as the Sun Blueprint papers, but time is now limited to complete those archives. Open source and free software coders should also make time to check their code in case it has any references to the soon to be defunct sun.com domain.

(djwm)